Top Metros for Same-Sex Couples with Children

By Richard Florida

With the passage of the New York Marriage Equality Act, the number of gay couples in the U.S. who are eligible to marry has now doubled, as my post yesterday noted. Approximately 9 million Americans are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) -- slightly less than four percent of the population, according a recent study by Gary Gates of UCLA's Williams Institute. Approximately half of lesbians and gay men are members of same-sex couples, including an estimated 160,000 who are married, according to Gates' research. Nearly one in five same-sex couple households are raising children, compared to about 45 percent of heterosexual couple households, according to figures from the American Community Survey (ACS).

The list below, drawn from Gates' analysis of data from the ACS, shows the 15 metros that have the largest percentage of same-sex couples raising children under 18 years of age. The densest concentrations of such families are not necessarily in the places where you'd expect to find them. Especially surprising are the metros that don't make the cut -- like San Francisco and New York.